Many theorists confuse neoliberalism with laissez faire, but neoliberals understand that the market utopia they desire requires state intervention. Early neoliberals like Hayek and Mises did not expect the neoliberal market order to just arise. They found it necessary to convince the population of the blessings of the neoliberal order, and they utilized the state as an indispensable and powerful tool in the attempt to create and safeguard this market based order.

The late cultural theorist Mark Fisher came up with an appropriate term for this phase of capitalist development. He called it: market Stalinism, where, “the idealized market was supposed to deliver friction free exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to qualification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy.”

That many Americans are becoming dimly aware of their precarious existence only feeds into this ongoing legitimation crisis embodied by the teacher strikes and labor militancy that appear to be the first signs of a nascent revolt against this oppressive market Stalinism. Both of our establishment political parties and the transnational oligarchs who own and control them are scared to death of the social democracy and working class revolts now on the ascendant, which threaten to undo 40 years of punitive austerity for us and record riches for themselves.

Luckily, American history provides an inspiring account of heroic activists who stand up to a nexus of state and corporate monopoly power. I’m talking, of course, about the Boston Tea Party where on December 16, 1773, American patriots boarded tea ships belonging to the hated East India Company anchored in the harbour and dumped their tea cargo overboard. At the time, the East India Company was the most powerful monopoly in the world, empowered by the British government to help maintain its sprawling empire.

Update: Senator Elizabeth Warren recently made national headlines with her plans to break up tech giants Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple, making it one of her signature proposals as she campaigns for the presidency. The notion should resonate and echo in our political memory—Teddy Roosevelt made his name as the trust-buster, for going after the great monopolies of the early 20th century in the name of the public interest. Twenty-first-century populist economics in America continues to be adorned the century-old piece of political syntax, “break ’em up.”

Warren’s essential rationale is that these tech companies act as monopolies and need to be cut down in size in order to promote more competitive markets, via traditional antitrust instruments such as the Sherman Act.